In the few times that I see Karen in the weeks that follow, in between receiving a few letters from Yelena, I discover some details about Karen’s past. She has not been back to Winnipeg in almost twelve years. She has been traveling from country to country, securing work mainly teaching English, sweeping floors, and waitressing. She worked on a Kibbutz in Israel and picked grapes in Greece, earning enough to travel from Spain to Portugal, through France and over to England and north to Norway. She ended her European tour in St. Petersburg, Russia but she couldn’t find work there as she spoke very little Russian, and all the jobs seemed to require fluency. She dated a man in the Russian military who left in order to engage in training exercises on the sea of Japan for what she said was far too long, and as he was travelling the sixteen days it took to get back across northern Mongolia, through parts of Kazakhstan and Siberia and back to St. Petersburg, she was making the necessary arrangements to return to a place where she once lived and worked—Ecuador.
“I’ve told you everything about myself,” Karen says to me one afternoon as we are sitting in plastic chairs on a bar patio, drinking Pilsners beside a busy street. “So, tell me: what leads you to stay in this country? And in Manta, of all places? Are you running away from something? Someone?”
Even though she professes to have apprised me of all of the details of her life, I sense that she has only intimated at them and is deliberately withholding the sentiments and motivations I demand of both patients and friends. At the same time, I have a desire to share her same experiences; not only to know more about them, but to know for myself the places to which she has travelled. I don’t feel as though I want to disclose any of this to her now, though, and so I try to think of an obscure answer which she might be able to correlate to her own situation.
“I’m running toward something,” I reply, unsure of how I might continue this.
“What’s that?” she asks.
I pause. I have begun her line of questioning, and I comprehend that because of Karen’s constant travelling, she has a frequent need to understand, and to be understood, by strangers. I suddenly experience a tinge of this same urge myself.
“I took Thoreau’s advice,” I say, incredulous at my own words, “to live the life I’ve always imagined.”
“And this is it, living here in Manta? Really? The life you’ve always imagined?”
“It is,” I reply emphatically, sitting up in my chair.
“You’re crazy,” she says, smiling.
“So how well did you know my father?” I ask.
She pauses and takes a deep breath just before a taxi kicks up dust and billows exhaust fumes beside us. She coughs before answering.
“I knew him a little, saw him around at parties. He taught English at the university whenever he needed money. He kept to himself most of the time. The Señora talked as though she loved him. They went out together one night, and she said it was the most enjoyable night of her life. They went from bar to bar, discoteca to discoteca, and he played the bagpipes as she entered each place. He ‘piped her in’, as she put it. And when she asked him when they were going to get married, your father simply said that she was too young for him, when they both knew she was actually twenty years older and separated from, but still legally married to a man who lived thousands of miles away in New York, while he was still legally married to your mother.”
She pauses to take a drink.
“So, are you married?” she asks.
I touch the ring in my pocket.
“Yes,” I reply, to which she appears surprised.
“Children?”
“Sort of.”
I hand her a copy of the ultrasound picture, and she scoffs.
“Oh.”
“My wife is much older than I am. The baby has Down syndrome, and it isn’t developing properly. The doctor says the fetus has clubbed feet and a head that is too small for her body, and she’ll have heart defects and mental problems. I’m giving my wife time, and writing her letters, to prevent her from making the worst mistake of her life. She wants to have her pregnancy terminated.”
Karen doesn’t ask me any more questions and, as we sit there in silence, quickly finishing our beers before leaving, I suddenly realize that I have never said those words to anyone else.